Header Menu

by Bruce Maulden

Menu

Orwell’s Complaint

July 6, 2014

Truth always trumps — no matter an impossible-case reporting what’s right. Case in point: Glenn Greenwald, in an interview last month: “The key to the social control was the possibility that they could be watched at any time.”

Published 64 years ago last week, George Orwell’s “1984” has been the ultimate/universal code for bad-government juju.

And Greenwald, the way-energetic writer involved with the Eddie Snowden disclosures, was also on promotion tour for his own latest book, a kind of Orwell-tie-in, “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State,” in which he details handling all the Snowden shit, and how all the Snowden shit came about, from Hong Kong to the now. I haven’t read it yet, and most-likely won’t until it appears in a second-hand bookstore, but I’ve followed Greenwald for years. When I first started this blog in April 2007, he was also blogging over at Salon, just having moved there from his own Unclaimed Territory (odd the old dates, but a truly-refreshed bio), and was working with subjects in which I was greatly interested — politics in general, and George Jr.’s fucking mess in particular. Greenwald can get shrill at times, and over-burden his stuff with way-too-much self-bluster-information to make a point, but 9.5 out of 10 times, the boy is right on the nose, despite the verbiage. And he was one of the first to point out Obama’s bullshit disappointment — now everyone seems to know..

Greenwald, though is seen as a left-of-center type, but he is the most-known of the Snowden reporters who did again plain-speak the reality of the modern world — some in jail, others awaiting.. Snowden, of course, dropped a huge turd in a way-small toilet bowel and shit spattered everywhere. A nasty, explosive, cat’s out-of-the-bag routine. The doodie bomb, though, made any intelligent, thoughtful person into a type of Winston Smith. Add to the mix that governments suck — the US government is pretty-much dysfunctional, and corrupt. Congress is despised by a huge majority of Americans. Given those ideals, it’s creepy these dumb, self-centered shitheads also are aware of everything we do, and keep our personal data (our actual lives) for years and years.

And the worse just getting worse — the latest yesterday via just the opening graphs of the story from the Washington Post (along with Greenwald/Guardian, a major spotlight-contributor on the NSA):

Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post. Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else. Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents. The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

The story gets into the details, and then this: The material spans President Obama’s first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection. And on to this:

No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects — not only from its targets but also from people who may cross a target’s path. … “None of the hits that were received were relevant,” two Navy cryptologic technicians write in one of many summaries of nonproductive surveillance. “No additional information,” writes a civilian analyst. Another makes fun of a suspected kidnapper, newly arrived in Syria before the current civil war, who begs for employment as a janitor and makes wide-eyed observations about the state of undress displayed by women on local beaches.

Which leads onto to the lie of how much did Snowden grab before he dashed to Hong Kong?

For close to a year, NSA and other government officials have appeared to deny, in congressional testimony and public statements, that Snowden had any access to the material. As recently as May, shortly after he retired as NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander denied that Snowden could have passed FISA content to journalists. “He didn’t get this data,” Alexander told a New Yorker reporter. “They didn’t touch —” “The operational data?” the reporter asked. “They didn’t touch the FISA data,” Alexander replied. He added, “That database, he didn’t have access to.”

Yet, Snowden could…because his final position as a contractor for Booz Allen at the NSA’s Hawaii operations center gave him “unusually broad, unescorted access to raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] under a special ‘Dual Authorities’ role,” a reference to Section 702 for domestic collection and Executive Order 12333 for collection overseas. And to even Obama:

More than 1,000 distinct “minimization” terms appear in the files, attempting to mask the identities of “possible,” “potential” and “probable” U.S. persons, along with the names of U.S. beverage companies, universities, fast-food chains and Web-mail hosts. Some of them border on the absurd, using titles that could apply to only one man. A “minimized U.S. president-elect” begins to appear in the files in early 2009, and references to the current “minimized U.S. president” appear 1,227 times in the following four years.

All one can say to that shit is WTF! Read the whole Post story, freaky. And one, too, ponders all the calamity-a-coming shit in the air nowadays, from climate change, to Fukushima, to the Dow Jones bullshit, now we got to handle this George-fucking-Orwell crap?